Developing Multiple Enterprise Apps is the New ‘Norm’

Published on: September 24, 2012

There was a time when developing one enterprise app was considered a major milestone. Today, companies are developing multiple apps, primarily to increase employee productivity and engage better with customers. Our recent online survey also underscores this trend.

We asked participants to vote on the number of enterprise mobile apps they are planning to develop over the next 12 months. Almost 300 people responded. More than 35 percent said they would build five to nine apps and 28 percent of respondents said two to four enterprise mobile apps, while 16 percent said they would build only one app.

This finding is consistent with other formal research that shows enterprises are beyond the dabbling stage with mobility. For example, Frost & Sullivan surveyed more than 300 business professionals earlier this year about enterprise mobile apps. They found that 82 percent of North American businesses already have at least one mobile app deployed to employees, 68 percent plan one or more additional apps in the coming year, and nine percent expect to introduce more than 10 new apps over the next 12 months.

Analyst firm Gartner, in its tech predictions for 2012 and beyond, foresees that by 2015, mobile app development projects will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of four to one. Meanwhile, a survey by Symantec found that 71 percent of businesses are considering creating a corporate app store to distribute mobile apps.

Yes, enterprise mobility is gaining in popularity and plans for mobile app development are expanding rapidly and aggressively. In reality, developing enterprise apps is a complex and time consuming process. The app has to run on multiple devices, must connect to multiple back-end systems, provide secure data access in today’s bring your own device (BYOD) world and be available even when the user is out of coverage.

Therefore it’s critical that a company select the right enterprise mobility platform to allow corporate users to do all this and more, including design once and deploy the app simultaneously across multiple devices and not have to code for each device. The technology should have integrated security, management and analytics capabilities so the platform could be used to build, deploy and manage apps – quickly and easily.

Do you agree that selecting the right platform is critical to a company’s mobility success? What else would you add to this list?